Well I have a lot more than 6 boxes of stuff in my place. I did do a lot of tinkering around with my stuff when I was out of work though, got around 10-12 complete systems I built out of parts just for fun.

BIF wrote:People with too much junk ... end up with garages they can't walk in. Forget parking a car!

That's us! There's a path through the mess just wide enough to get to the shelves with the tools on them, and to take the trash out. Though a significant percentage of the junk in the garage is actually my wife's, not mine. Having two hoarders in the family is a problem...

BIF wrote:My last two computers did not use floppy ribbon cables, parallel PATA cables, or removable PATA drive bays, so the next community garage sale attendees will have lots of my old mercury-laden equipment to choose from.

I finally had to forcibly declutter. The audio hobby and the computer hobby were fighting each other for shelf space.

Now that StarFalcon has the Super7 box, and following some recent New Year's housekeeping, I'm down to one Tualatan P3 system (Win2k) and a Northwood P4 (WinXP), plus about two cubic feet of miscellania.

Old case covers typically are. A few screws and it's one sheet of metal bent in 2 places.

I just got OS X 10.5 installed on a PowerMac G4/466. Did an OpenFirmware trick to make the installer think it was a G4/867. I pulled it out of the recycle bin at the bottom floor of this building, 31 floors and a communal recycle bin for electronics. Their genius method of wiping the existing drive was to take it out, leave it in its Mac-specific drive caddy, and place it next to the actual machine. After I snagged some songs and images (machine was for making brochures?) I wiped it and installed 10.5 over... dunno what was on it, they had a user account with login and I didn't care enough to try and reset the password.

Man it's fun to reminisce, but there's no way I'd want to actually USE any of that old hardware in a productive manner today. 486SX with 8MB of RAM on today's internet? Scary. A Macintosh SE for a modern publishing gig? No way. They're just relegated to playing old games nowadays.

I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do, I do not do. But what I hate, I do.

Scrotos wrote:Old case covers typically are. A few screws and it's one sheet of metal bent in 2 places.

Yeah, but that's not one of the pieces with toxic materials in it, so the fact that it is easily recyclable matters less.

I disagree for two reasons. First, why is there a relative value to iron versus lead? As a response to

It is just completely wrong to state that any part of them is "readily disassembled for recycling"

...it's a simple counterpoint.

And second, you've tried lifting that old stuff so you know this... I'm not so sure the cases weren't made outta lead back then! (and crafted for maximal opportunity for metal cuts on the insides of the cases)

derFunkenstein wrote:Man it's fun to reminisce, but there's no way I'd want to actually USE any of that old hardware in a productive manner today. 486SX with 8MB of RAM on today's internet? Scary. A Macintosh SE for a modern publishing gig? No way. They're just relegated to playing old games nowadays.

Oh yeah, to be sure. There are still some fanatics about old stuff but they seem to be more like Amiga users or some old Mac diehards. It's old games and old productivity software, say that version of dBase IV that has all your vinyl cataloged. But online? Too far behind, especially with video.

...I'd still be interested in getting a PCI modern card working in a 486 running XP, though, that'd be a hoot!

Chrispy_ wrote:Heh, Final Reality was a product of Remedy's game engine which spawned an offshoot project under the guise of MadOnion called 3DMark; You may have heard of that before somewhere

It stopped being fun, but I used to go back and run Quake2 timedemos every time I upgraded, also Aquamark which eventually just started crashing (probably an x64 issue).

Dunno, I'm actually playing Quake 2 again... I was up in the attic digging through old boxes and found the Quake4 special edition I bought from paulWTAMU 3 or 4 years ago. Damn my memory! It dawned on me that I never finished the Q2 mission packs, so I found a mod that improved the graphics and restored the music, and I've been Quaking like a fool the past couple weeks!

15 years later, that damn game still rocks.

"No I don't want the Ask toolbar! No I don't want Bing as my default search! No I don't want to make Chrome my default browser!""Good grief, man! WHAT are you trying to install on that poor computer?""Antivirus."

We used to have doom lan parties where we would get on Zdoom (or whatever we used) and play that on lan. That was super sick. I love watching the quake speed runs. The 100% complete quake video on youtube is a lot of fun to watch. I love the quake sounds. I used to just turn it on in the background and work with it playing.

just brew it! wrote:"Old case covers typically are. A few screws and it's one sheet of metal bent in 2 places."Yeah, but that's not one of the pieces with toxic materials in it, so the fact that it is easily recyclable matters less.

I disagree for two reasons. First, why is there a relative value to iron versus lead?

The relative value is in keeping the lead out of the waste stream.

I guess it rubs me the wrong way because the tone seems to be, unless it's toxic, don't waste the effort to recycle. I'm no hug-a-tree recycling freak or nothin', but it seems to me that anything is better than nothing even if it doesn't make economic sense and will destroy the free world.